Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness

"My fourth choice is a book by Christopher Barnett called Kierkegaard: Pietism and Holiness . When I read it, I thought: how can I have been thinking and writing about Kierkegaard without really knowing about this? This book focuses on a key aspect of the intellectual context and background to Kierkegaard’s thinking: Pietism. Pietism is a movement within Lutheran Christianity, which was about concentrating on living a holy life. In a sense, it anticipates existentialism, since this ideal of holiness was less about believing certain doctrines and more about a religion of the heart. It was a devotional movement which prioritised feeling and emotion over belief and reason. This was really an important part of the culture that Kierkegaard grew up in. Indeed, many German and Danish thinkers of the nineteenth century had Pietist backgrounds—most of the leading German Romantics, for example. So, the Romantic emphasis on feeling actually came out of the Pietist tradition, which emphasised religious feeling. It’s a very important cultural and intellectual force that shaped Kierkegaard’s authorship. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This book gives a really nice history of Pietism, explaining what the issues were and then showing how Kierkegaard’s thinking was shaped by that Pietist heritage. For me, it made sense of a lot of Kierkegaard’s thinking to see it from this perspective. Pietism is not discussed much these days: a movement like Romanticism is more recognisable and occupies more of a place, perhaps, in our contemporary culture—we recognise Romantic art, and so on—whereas Pietism is something that specialists know about. But beyond this, it tends to be a forgotten aspect of the cultural heritage of the modern world. It was principally a reaction against a rationalising shift within Lutheranism. Pietism reacted against that, just as Romanticism reacted against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It’s part of a broader resistance to rationalist ways of thinking. Another important aspect of Pietism, which is also really important for Kierkegaard, is the critique of organised religion. Some influential Pietists were quite anti-clerical and anti-establishment. That’s another important theme that Kierkegaard takes from Pietism: being critical of the establishment, being critical of institutional religion, and elevating the individual’s experience of God above these hierarchical ecclesial structures, and prioritsing the individual’s inward, heartfelt relationship to God. But this is not the individual in isolation but the individual in community, because the Pietists were often socialist and communitarian as well as anti-establishment. They had communes, for example, where they had their own laws, more or less separate from the state. So, various elements of this Pietist culture found their way into Kierkegaard’s thinking and his critique of conventional institutional religion. In a way, Kierkegaard’s whole project as a writer was to challenge what he called Christendom—the social, institutional, established religion—and to search within that for a more authentic kind of faith. Or maybe not even faith , but a more authentic quest for truth and for meaning. “That’s a crucial part of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on seeking and pursuing and desiring: this sense of the erotic pursuit of truth” ‘Faith’ is a word that is used a lot when discussing Kierkegaard, as if his philosophy is all about believing in God without any evidence or reason. But I think what’s more fundamental for Kierkegaard is the desire and longing for God—a sort of spiritual quest. Faith can sometimes give the impression of something you possess, a kind of certainty of belief; whereas for Kierkegaard, it’s much more about desire and longing and finding ways to pursue that longing. Finding ways to express an inarticulate desire for God in your life, even though you might not really know what God is, or what finding God would look like. It’s a sense of being drawn along a spiritual path without necessarily knowing what the destination is. That’s quite different from many institutional religions, which present doctrines as readymade religious teachings: truths that are non-negotiable, that you just sign up to, rather than this more open-ended questing relationship to religion, which actually echoes Socratic philosophy. Socrates’s life was devoted to a search for knowledge which was, in a way, elusive. He saw the philosophical life as open-ended. That’s a crucial part of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on seeking and pursuing and desiring: this sense of the erotic pursuit of truth. You don’t really know what it’s going to look like when you find it. Yes, definitely. Many of the thinkers who identified themselves as existentialists in the twentieth century—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would be the most famous examples—were explicitly atheistic. Existentialism can have connotations of a humanist and individualistic quest to find or create meaning for yourself, and even creating yourself, making yourself into a certain kind of person through your choices and decisions; whereas, for Kierkegaard—and this is the central point in The Sickness Unto Death— human beings don’t make themselves, and we’re always dependent because we’re created. We’re in search of the ground of our being, which is not ourselves. This is one of the reasons why it’s really important to understand Kierkegaard’s roots in Pietism, for example, which connects him to an older Catholic devotional, mystical tradition of Christianity. That’s also in the background of much existentialist thought, but when we look at existentialism from a secular viewpoint, this background gets overlooked. For me, it’s impossible to read Kierkegaard in a secular light. He wasn’t a dogmatic Christian, but he was preoccupied with the question of how to live religiously. What would it mean to live in relation to God?"